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Published: August 10th 2006
Marcos' plane
This is Marcos' plane, a 1951 Beechcraft Bonanza V35The company that hosts me has a datacenter i Los Angeles. Usually we just remote administrate the servers down there, but this time we had to go down to move som stuff around.
Anyways, Marcos, my CTO(Chief Technical Officer) has a small plane, so he decided we should fly down in that. In addition to me and Marcos, Dave and Gabe was coming along. Dave is our sysadmin, while Gabe is a friend of Marcos that was going to Las Vegas, so we decided to drop him of there.
After lengthy weight calculations on Marcos' part, he had us meet him at Palo Alto airport at 18.00 Sunday evening. You see, the problem with small aircraft like this, is not only the weight restrictions (they can only take som much load), but the balance is equally important.
After more calculations, Marcos decided to put Dave and Gabe in the back, with me in the front next to him. As I was climbing in, I hesitated a bit, so the plane actually tilted back and touched the ground with its tail. It stabilized as soon as I went forward though. Luckily the plane has metal stud at the tailboom,
View over Mountain View and Sunnyvale
A view over Mountain View and Sunnyvale. and the controller didn't see us.
We got some fuel, and then taxied of to the runway. The runway was really short, and we were very heavy, so we had to use every inch of it before we finally lifted off. We swept east across the bay, heading for Las Vegas. After we stabilized our flight, Marcos slowly handed me the controls. I was flying a plane for the first time in my life! It was very exciting, but much harder than it looks. There is a lot of instrumentation to keep track of, and keeping the airplane level and steady is hard.
As we were heading south, it became dark, and keeping the aircraft level and straight became even harder. We were lucky enough to be routed directly from Bakersfield over Mojave, which is usually closed because of military activity. As we approached Las Vegas, Marcos took over again, because flying in controlled airspace is very hard. The controller took us to the west of The Strip, let us round the Stratosphere and then we proceeded to land. We taxied to the Atlantic Executive terminal for parking. There were a lot of bizjets there. And I mean
Me at the controls
Here I am, flying for the first time. Very exciting indeed. Loved it. I just HAVE to get my pilots licence after this :D A LOT. Las Vegas is probably one of the busiest biz-jet airports in the world. According to the guys at the airport, it was very calm that day, despite the fact that there was at least 100 different bizjets standing around. Gulfstreams, Challengers, Learjets, you name it.
While getting more fuel, Marcos checked the conditions in Los Angeles, and found out it was very clouded. This meant for a tough landing, so we decided to stay over in Las Vegas. We tried to get two rooms, but apparently the hotel where Gabe had a room was full, so we had to crash in his room. Dave was exhausted, so he went straight to bed, while me and Marcos went to grab some food. We went over to the MGM Grand, and finally found a 24hour cafeteria.
After eating, Marcos went to bed, while I headed out towards the strip to check out some of the sights of Las Vegas. I went towards the Excalibur and the Luxor and took some snapshots of the hotels. I was thinking of continuing further up, but found out that this was the wrong direction of the strip, so I headed back to
A view of The Strip
Here is a view of The Strip in Las Vegas. The Stratosphere in the foreground. the Tropicana and grabbed a few hours of sleep on the floor.
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